There's a sensory experience that's also generally considered to be an emotional state which we might call something like "heart-warming" or "stirring"—we may even compare it to wonder or awe or some kind of peak experience—all bundled under the umbrella-term "kama muta."
Kama muta is a phrase derived from Sanskrit, and it literally means "moved by love." Applied to social theory, though, it's become a label slapped on a menagerie of positive sensations, many of which we feel in response to external stimuli and which may exist because there are evolutionary benefits to feeling such things.
The foundational assumption, then, is that it may be evolutionarily beneficial to feel powerful emotions when, for instance, dancing to drum-heavy music with a group of other humans, or when seeing a child run to her father and hug him after he's been away for a long time.
"Communal sharing relations" is one of the four key social relations described by the Relational Models Theory, and it may be that these emotions we feel—almost like an echo of what other humans around us are feeling—strengthen group bonds and our relationships with other individuals in our group.
We feel more empathy, more compassion, more love and commonality with people with whom we've shared such experiences. When we share tears of joy and chills and peak moments of clarity and happiness and awe, we feel closer and more connected to those around us with whom we shared those feelings.
This is thought to be part of why so many cultural traditions—from groups around the world and throughout history—have made use of activities that evoke this sensation.
Faith, nation, ideology, or sports team: they've all got rituals engineered to make us feel closer to other members of these tribes, and that closeness is seemingly at least partially stimulated, magnified, and maintained by kama muta-related emotions.
Such emotions can be "delivered" in person, in drum-circles or military ceremonies, or they can be transmitted via media: through writing, sound, and video.
In-person concerts, then, or shared tragedies, can trigger this sensation, but so can virtual concerts or tragedies we experience in real-time on social media with other people from around the world.
We can experience kama muta while taking in nature or art, and while working toward common causes. And research has shown that utilizing such techniques can help unify previously oppositional or out-groups, but it can also just be good for views and clicks; it's entertaining and pleasurable to have such experiences. It's maybe even addictive in some sense to some people.
This is still more of a framework—possibly even a stand-in concept waiting for something better to arrive—than a fully realized realm of academic study.
It's been well-researched, but it's arguably mostly useful as a bit of terminology that allows us to see these seemingly disparate emotions as part of a larger, macro-scale emotional state which itself might be related to our biological wiring and inform why we're so good at working together and building societies, despite such efforts sometimes requiring we go against personal, survival-related instincts.
Brain Lenses is an Understandary project.
You can find the Brain Lenses podcast at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.